July 2007 archive

Free Software Money Management Quandary

Update, 10 January 2008: See “related” below for the latest on this topic.

I found myself facing a moral quandary yesterday. I considered using proprietary software for a job that has lots of free software alternatives. You see, I have these doubts and reservations about the free options.

The gravitational pull of 12 years worth of Microsoft Money data has me continuing to run that program on my laptop. I really like MS Money; it’s worked great for managing my finances from when I was an underemployed drop-out living in my Mom’s basement through going back to school, moving out, having a real job and investments, getting married, and buying a house. It has great reporting features: you can really slice and dice the data.

Another potential problem I’ve created for …

One Year of ‘Moving to Freedom’

On 19 July 2006, I posted my first real entry on this blog, introducing ‘Moving to Freedom’ BETA. (Previous to that there were a few fake test posts, now deleted, some of which still seem to be echoing around in Google, judging by complaints of missing pages I sometimes see in Webmaster Tools.)

I had some idea of what I wanted to do with the site, but was uncertain how I’d go about it or if I could really sustain this thing. I have to say I’m not totally ashamed of that first post nor of my efforts this past year. I think I can do a lot better, but I’m happy with how things have gone and enjoy writing here. Thanks to all of you for reading and emailing …

Summer Days, One Step at a Time

Thursday marked one year of “Moving to Freedom.” But this isn’t the post for that; I’m planning another entry with graphs and stats and suitably pompous observations. I bring it up as a way of explaining my posting lately. I don’t feel the need to apologize, but I realize I’m not posting a lot of on-topic entries, and what I am posting is pretty light-weight. (Although that could be just because I’m shallow and uninteresting.)

I feel compelled to explain that I really want to post more on topic stuff and more in-depth, but I’m busy enjoying the summer. Last year we had a new baby and so weren’t out doing as much, and I also spent a lot of time working on getting this site started. I enjoyed learning …

Lake Superior Rocky and Pebbly Shoreline

Penguin Pete wrote a nice tutorial on how to make 3D pebbles in the GIMP. I haven’t tried the howto yet but trust that it will explain things very well.

He wrote “Grab an example image of pebbles or rocks from online/creative-commons works. Since we’re only going to be sampling them for a few pixels, licensing isn’t as hot an issue,” which prompted me to think about these pictures I took a few years ago on the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota. We stayed in a small cabin right off this beach. I wish now I had taken more shots of wet pebbles, as the water brings out the colors better and makes a nice sheen.

Being a fan of free culture, I decided to put these out here as raw material for would-be tutorial users. …

Lines are Blurring

I still work on a Windows laptop for my day job (but thankfully also on a Red Hat Linux server), and I’m using VNC to remotely run Microsoft Money and a couple of Excel spreadsheets on a laptop at home, but other than that I’ve been all in Ubuntu at home (well, a little bit of Fedora also). Still loving the learning process and still so much to do. Every direction I turn there’s something new I want to figure out and I go down all kinds of side alleys in addition to the normal time I burn in my feeds.

It feels comfortable and it feels like home, with a few minor exceptions of things I want to do and haven’t figured out how to do yet.

I just read a humorous rant …

Not Unexpectedly: K3b is Just Swell for CD and DVD Burning in GNU/Linux

When I wrote about using Brasero for CD burning in GNOME a few months ago, I realized that the KDE app K3b was out there and probably pretty good, but Brasero was fine for what I was doing at the time so I didn’t look any further.

I also figured I’d want to try K3b soon enough when I needed more options and flexibility. Well it didn’t take many burning jobs to get there. I wanted to burn a data backup DVD and realized that Brasero was dereferencing symbolic links. That is, if it finds a link to a directory or file, it counts linked files as actual files to be added to the compilation rather than just links. I can understand that some …